Thursday, July 28, 2011

(1) The Greatest Vice (2) Military Suicides


THE GREATEST VICE


  At first, Muslims were blamed by the mob for the mass murders actually commited by those clean-cut young native sons of the U.S.A. and Norway, Timothy McVeigh and Andrew Behring Breivik.  As McVeigh was murdered by the state we will never have the opportunity to see if in the future he would have comprehended his own actions, or how society might have learned from observing him how to prevent future McVeighs.  Fortunately, the Norwegians are not so murderous, and Breivik will not be killed by the State, while he has stated that he knows he will serve life in prison.  We will have a chance to see if he ever wakes up to the reality of what he has done, or tell us how he got there.
       One thing that these two young men have in common is what is universally considered a “virtue,” but what is actually the worst vice on the planet:  self-righteousness.  In simple old common sense language, they were “so right they were wrong.”  Beside the factors in their personal psychology histories – which are as important as anything – they were clear in their statements about what had aroused their righteous indignation, which, for them, justified the most extreme reaction. 
           Even those not directly harmed by their acts are apt to be seized by the vice of self-righteousness and will call for their murder by the state, a state of mind no different from the state of the mind of the murderers they want to murder.  But will the people who call for their deaths recognize that they are the same as those they wish to murder?  How many people possessed by the vice of self-righteous will openly celebrate or smile in private when they hear of the murder of a doctor who provides abortions.  While in other parts of their lives they may be loving citizens who personally would never murder, when it comes to whatever makes them feel full of a supposed virtue of self-righteousness, they will feel justified to celebrate a murder.  Bless Norway that seems to know the poisonous nature of feeling righteous.  Look at every sick situation on the earth, in the nation, and in our personal lives, and you will see that the root of the conflict is this vice of self-righteousness.  The robber feels that, compared with others, he is not getting the share he deserves, and feels righteous about a rough achievement of equality.  Some will react negatively if I say that resentment and envy justifies in the rapist’s mind his violent act.
Does anyone do wrong?  Or, rather, is the wrong they do not done with a sense of self-righteousness that empowers?  I have certainly in my life not been free of this so-called virtue which is the worst vice, and I always hope I can face up to my fear of examining how it exists in my life, past and present, but I do know that enjoying a sense of self-righteousness is the opposite of being one who helps create a world of peace and love. 
Postscript:  I have to add this about another matter – military suicides.  It is heartbreaking to hear the “sleepy” reaction of relatives of service people or veterans who commit suicide:  “I don’t understand.  He seemed O.K.”  Will the time ever come when they will understand the decency of their child being troubled by murdering people (let alone if they awaken to the fact that they have been manipulated by the sordid motives of nations and war profiteers).  Here is a human with a conscience reacting with horror at murders he or she has been forced to commit. Around them, there is no one to celebrate them as the true heroes, and they are far from people who might have told them the thoughts that lead to their suicides proved their greater humanity, not that they were failing some primitive definition of manhood or  spurious patriotism.  
  

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Impression of Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS


IN Werner Herzog’s film CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, the caves in themselves are incredibly beautiful, crystalline with rock like folded meringue, surfaces like crystallized sugar, and old bones seeming turned into enamel.
     Perhaps, like me, you have many special feelings about caves, from many connections, real and metaphorical, but my strongest feelings derive from reading anthropologist, Geza Roheim’s writings about the significance of caves to aborigines of Australia as the residence of The Eternal Ones of the Dream, central to their myths and rituals.     (http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Ones-Dream-Psychoanalytic-Interpretation/dp/1417977132) .  Except for one significant story he tells about the caves in Australia Werner Herzog does not seem aware of Roheim’s wonderful, but obscure book, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, and it is perhaps just a common feeling about caves that caused him to name his film, CAVE OF THE FORGOTTEN DREAMS. 
     The meaning Geza Roheim gathered from how the aborigines felt about their cave of the Eternal Ones of the Dream is sublimely rich:  a cave that is both womb and tomb, end and origin, where the bones of the ancestral past feed the present what it needs to sustain its soul. 
Perhaps intending to allow us to have that experience of the cave where real and myth are at last fused, toward the end of his documentary Herzog allows us a time of wordless meditation as our eyes travel over the images in the Chavet cave, and our own thoughts wander and wonder.  What is the power celebrated in these big-chested animals?  Why the panache of their curling horns?       The amazing artists of that time, almost 32,000 years ago, lived with more powerful antecedents of the current descendants of those animals, as drawn on the cave walls.  And the trick that hits home is that a recurring pair in human history and myth are joined here “at the beginning,” a figure that is the head and torso of a bull blending with the lower torso of a female human.  
In the case of this movie, the 3D adds immeasurably. 
DO SEE See a short, incredible interview with Herzog where he speaks about the film’s postscript about radioactive albino crocodiles: http://www.wernerherzog.com/index.php?id=64
The only thing not answered for me is how they painted the figures:  Was if from the charcoal on the burned end of a stick?  Were their earth dyes?  The drawings are done with an easy swing of the arms, but where a hand-print was made, I guess all the people who did that thought up the same thing:  To chew some material until it was pulp, then, through puckered lips, spray at the hand outstretched on a rock.
I guess it was all done with “charcoal,” but I need to go and check that out.  The movie should have told.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

SOME DAYS IT FEELS LIKE (...a rough-hewn sort-of-sonnet)


The following was a private venting of the bad feelings of the times -- a means for catharsis, but someone urged me to place it on my blog:

SOME DAYS IT FEELS LIKE...

My heart is more than broken.
It is pierced by shards
Of human toil and turmoil.

All that may be spoken
About all the broken accords
Cannot redeem our soil.

But dirt is just where it ends
And where it all begins again,
Trucking through this bloody muck.

From somewhere something sends -- 
When you decide to begin again --
Something as strong as the word Fuck,
Stronger than the idea of God,
Something inside you -- Call it pluck.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

6 July 2011 -- Clarion Alley, San Francisco

Walking with Leslie Angeline and Martha Hubert to have lunch at PicaPica (serving variants on maize) we passed Clarion Alley, and stopped to look at the art -- more and more, alleys and buildings are covered with murals, art, graffiti as art.  Click on title above if you would like to see what we saw.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

5 July 2011-- J and J Create a Drawing

Jim Breeden came over from San Francisco with the plan that he and I, Jim Eilers, should make a drawing together, trading stroke by stroke.  What should we name our first attempt?

4 July 2011, with S.F. Mime Troupe

Lloyd Stensrud suggested seeing the San Francisco Mime Troupe in Dolores Park on the 4th of July.  The Mime Troupe always skewer the ills of the system, an antidote to the blind patriotism that sentimentalizes the blood sacrifice of America's youth for leaders who are little more than the pimps who whore us all -- and that was the theme of their little musical -- how to survive capitalism with any sense of integrity.  Consider how their audience can sometimes be 50 to 100 people sitting on the grass before the stage, this 4th of July, the attendance was EPIC (as shown on the slide show you may watch by clicking on the title of this section).  Afterward, on my way to the 24th Street BART station, for my return to Oakland, I walked down Osage Alley, which is becoming another of the many alleys devoted to graffiti art.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Code Pink Tags the Israeli Embassy, 30 June 2011

In front of the building in San Francisco that holds the Israeli Embassy, Code Pink left messages about the impending peace flotilla to sail to help the people in Gaza.
Click on title above to see a brief slide show of the messages they left.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Gay Pride 2011 -- For Bradley Manning

Click on title above if you want to see a short slide show of Gay Pride 2011 in San Francisco.

In the mass of humans at the 2011 Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, it seemed that every 5th person had a camera, meaning that a hundred thousand photos were taken of people and elements in a parade that lasted many hours.  Mine are from a very tiny niche:  The photos are mainly from when I was waiting for our contingent -- in support of Bradley Manning -- to begin marching.
Also, I was wearing my collage poster for Manning so it made it rather difficult to take any photos.
Also, I like best taking pictures of children at such events, and, in this case, beautiful women.

Thursday, June 09, 2011

Take Time Out for a Quiet Moment

Click on "Take Time Out for a Quiet Moment" and have a minute or two of peace with a very brief video.

What Is It?

Click on "What is it?" for a short enough video on which I ask, "What is it?" -- Comments welcome, no matter how scathing. 

Rain on Palm Leaves

There is a central court where I live, full of palms, and I love to hear the rain fall on the palm leaves:  Click on "Rain Palm Leaves" above for a very brief video -- maybe just long enough for you to sink into a moment of peace -- and I hope you have sound.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Pardon -- a Sunday Sermon

Slain Elephant:
     Coming out into the general nature of the earth, each of us is free to conceive and attempt to embody our individual definition of “human nature” – It is ours to choose, and the more valuable and beautiful the longer we search to understand and define it.  We are free to choose a better or worse definition, as revealed by our actions and attitudes.  For some of us, the imagination that we wish all humans would favor and attempt to demonstrate is centered on Compassion – the sense of empathy and justice present in the first rule learned by every child:  “Treat others as you would have them treat you.”  Simple, but clearly not easily realized in our world, and, by many, rejected.
     Many are familiar with the concept of “the vital lie.”  While we live in a factual reality of the senses – now, in the past, and in the future – through language, thought, and creativity we create an overlay that we may call The Word, and we live under that imaginary dome as well.  Ideas, dreams, goals might be called illusions in comparison with our finding ways to survive as physical beings in a physical world.  You may choose to call this metaphysical world a vital lie, but we are not about to live without that other, symbolic reality. 
     Remembering how we are almost ghostly or fictional or spirit-beings as we play with thought, art, and invention, beyond meeting our daily needs, we might hope to escape self-delusion and self-division if we let Doubt be our guardian spirit, ever questioning our pleasant fictions and conjectures, and reminding us that they are human projections. 
     It is not likely that humans can live very harmoniously without some mythos of a general human unity – the challenge is to create a sane and wholesome imagination of a “human nature.”
     The dominant mythos so far in human history has been of there being some parent reality looking over the human race.  It is a comfort for humans to turn to that fiction when feeling overwhelmed.  But sanity requires that we move on.  With tragic consequences world-wide as we shift from one world view to another, God is taking a long time dying; notions of an afterlife are blighting the only life we shall ever have.  Most of the present population will miss the chance to embrace truly the only life they will ever know.  If they do not find the riches of the mind and imagination and humane values, they are not likely to make the transition out of the God delusion into an awakened life.
     The transition from that mythos of God and eternal life is stalled, and until that change is complete we cannot know a new general sense of balance that might happen through a new imagination, in which Doubt and Questioning are central, not Faith and Obedience. 

     “In God we trust” makes no more sense than “In the Easter Bunny (or Santa Claus) we trust.”  As in the tale of the Emperor With the Invisible Clothes, we must listen to those people turn to as leaders who weave that delusionary reality around everything they say, invalidating everything they say, using a delusion to delude others into actions destructive to the human race.  The comforts found in religion can be found in human metaphor, and all the trappings and stories and comforts of religion would be made less dangerous if seen as metaphors.  Time for the human race to grow up, awaken, and learn to be self-parenting.  All is possible with the jewel of Compassion.

     There are probably innumerable sites on the Internet and in any library where voices urge this same change.  A quick glance finds
John Kaminski offers this quotations by Johnny Barzakh:  “A society that denies death winds up killing all that it loves.”
Kaminski urges a “new consciousness that mandates transcendence of the pathological aspects of belief while keeping all those old wonderful values that we all love.”
     “We’re all trapped in a complex web of mistranslated myths that have been used to anesthetize the populations for purposes of commercial exploitation. This is the pattern of all history. Keeping the peace means getting people to agree upon a pleasurable lie. And always, the local God is turned into a hammer with which to slam the neighbor.”
     Becker:
     “The killing of others anesthetizes our fear of death.”
     “War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred of the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.”
     “Killing others lessens our own fear of dying, although it is own sense of animality and inferiority we try to kill — and never succeed.”
     “There is nothing in man or in nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our destiny and making the world a safer place for our children.”

     Others addressing the matter of “the vital lie":

Friday, May 27, 2011

Circo Poetico 22 May 2011

Click on title line above to see slide show.

 Joan Howard of the Main Street Theatre, 915 Cayuga Avenue, San Francisco, and Alice Elizabeth Rogoff of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal -- in collaboraiton with Carlos Ramirez, Cesar Love, Genie Cartier, Indigo Hotchkiss, and Stephen Kopel -- produced this charming and delightful combination of poets and circus performers -- CIRCO POETICO.



Thursday, May 26, 2011

What an Easy and Mellow Way to Turn 74

Witness the wonderful "personalized" chocolate cake Jim Breeden made for my birthday along with one of his gourmet meals:  to say it was Caesar Salad with chicken does not convey the rich taste, with home-made croutons, and all.
It was the climax of my eating my way through my turning 74, with kind and sweet friends helping me slip through this happy pause in what Gary Gach wished will be my "Happy Continuation."
For the subliminal level that was connected with food:  Thank you, Martha and Carrie, for the candle stuck on a pint of hard-to-find Three Twins Cardamon ice cream. Thank you, Dana, Bud, and Doris, for brunch at the restaurant at the south end of the Ferry Building: artichoke, chard, and gruyere cheese omelet.  Thank you to the two Pauls for dinner at the Pacific Cafe:  salmon bisque, halibut parmesan, and Mitchell's strawberry ice cream.  Thank you, Fred, for dinner at that French restaurant near Laguna Honda Hospital:  onion soup, flounder with capers, and floating island (meringue).   And in all those places, with all those meals, wonderful conversation.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Robert Bly at Hillside Club, Berkeley, 20 May 2011


Click on title above if you would like to see a slide show of Robert Bly reading in Berkeley on 20 May 2011.  I was happy to hear him say that for him poetry begins with sounds, even before meanings.   He read in The Hillside Club.  From their brochure: "The Hillside Club was founded in 1898 by a group of Berkeley women who wanted to preserve the rocky contours, live oaks, and waterways of the environment and protect the hills of their city by ensuring that buildings be designed to blend with the natural landscape.
 The original 1906 club house, designed by architect and member Bernard Maybeck, was destroyed in the Berkeley fire of 1923.  The current Hillside Club was built the next year by Maybeck's partner and brother-in-law John White in the character of the original building.  The club grew into a venue for cultural activities."

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Teachers Demonstration, Sacramento, 13 May 2011

Click on subject title to see 10-photo slide show from "Teachers Demonstration, Sacramento, 13 May2011."

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Photos, Recent Collage, Drawing





Stephen Snyder, Translator













Stephen Snyder, translator of Japanese literature, such as the surreal novels of Yoko Ogawa, speaks at the Center for the Art of Translation on 10 May 2011. 
For more about his presentation:
http://catranslation.org/blogpost/stephen-snyder-yoko-ogawa-haruki-murakami

Monday, April 25, 2011

Already SOLD: Posters of Nocturnal Dream (& Cockettes) Shows, Early 1970s

I had an entry about old posters available for sale, but they have all been sold.  I assume that the posters can still be seen if you click on the poster below or on the link to them.
If you live in the Bay Area, you may know that the unique stage phenomenon, the Cockettes, that came to life at the Palace Theater in North Beach, San Francisco (during the showing of great and unique films, the Nocturnal Dream Show) at midnight on Saturday nights, in the early 1970s had a miraculous renaissance recently, with their resurrected PEARLS OVER SHANGHAI just ending a 2-year run.
Before that resurgence I had written a nostalgic photo-essay about them in

the May June 2008 issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review.
I am told that the posters I have, that I picked up at the time of the shows, are worth at least $200 a piece.  To survey them, check on the title above to see a slide show.  Most of them are full size posters, but some are smaller and more rare, and there is a postcard and a sheet on Secret Cinema, a theater in the Mission, where the troupe moved after the Palace Theater.  If you are interested in purchasing any, you can leave a note in the comment section on this entry with your email address, which I will keep secret, but I will contact you via email.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Maxine Hong Kingston's new book

I had a mid-afternoon snack in the cafe at 30th and Church; if I ate later, I might be sleepy at the 6 o’clock event at Mechanics Library where I was to meet up with Martha and Leslie to see Maxine Hong Kingston.  I took the 24 Divisadero to go to the Castro, to then take a Muni train downtown, and, while I was on the 24, Martha got on; she was on her way to sing with 2 other women, members of the Threshhold Choir, going from room to room, in the Coming Home Hospice.  We kidded around, of course, and acted silly, and as she got off the bus she said, “See ya later, alligator,” which made me groan, but made other people on the bus laugh.
I went downtown and read under the dome at Bloomingdale’s until it was time to go to the Mechanics Library.  The event was packed.  I sat in front of my sweet Code Pink sisters, who work so hard for peace and justice, Leslie and Martha, and before the program had started, they, of course, lay a hand on my shoulder, gave me a sip of wine, placed one of their hats on my head, but they soon settled down.  To begin with, the head of the Asian Foundation gave Kingston an "Asian heroine” award.  

Kingston read from her new book about how she feels about aging (she is only 65!), I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (from a quote from Thoreau), then she was interviewed by Andrew Lam, and they made their conversation political, and progressive, as well as literary.  The audience at Mechanics Library is neatly Middle Class, well groomed, not likely to balk at the inexpensive membership, and I guess none were alarmed to hear her speak openly about being the child of illegal immigrants; she mentioned how that had affected her style where she kept everything relative, for example, in one story, confusing the reader with three versions of her father, in order to conceal the truth about the real one.  I cannot cover everything talked about, all very interesting, but it is interesting that her first novel, WARRIOR WOMAN, is used very extensively in classes in China.    
In spite of heads always blocking my view, I photographed Ms. Kingston precisely at the moment when she was talking about her work for peace.  I have seen her speak before the Veterans for Peace, and she has done extensive work, helping veterans recover from war (reflected in her last book).  She addressed the feeling people may have that  demonstrating for peace seems hopeless, recalling how she and Alice Walker were arrested in protest of the planned invasion of Iraq, and, of course, that did not stop that horror.  My answer would have been that the saying, "Faith can move mountains," is quite literal; it means the patience and stubborn will to move a  mountain, if necessary, quite literally, one grain of sand at a time, as if one had centuries of time.   She had her own way of expressing that, reading from a passage in her book that our work for peace here would not save anyone in our time, but would save someone from death on a battlefield far in the future just as some unknown person centuries ago did something that helped her be now where and who she is – Her dream-like view of reality and a Chinese sense of the long span of time.  

It turned out that Leslie and her guy were to be married many years before, with a ceremony ministered or administered by Ms. Kingston's husband, Earl; Kingston’s hair, now a silver waterfall, dramatically white, "was still black," said Leslie.  But they were still acquainted.
Martha gave Ms. Kingston some peace symbol earings. 


As usual with peace activists, they all knew people in common, and compared the work being done for peace.



I photographed Leslie with her old friends.  
I ended up with Martha, Leslie, and Thom.  Thom ordered some Chinese food from Alice’s Restaurant, and he soon went down the street and picked it up.  Martha made some green tea with something roasted in it, so that it tasted very Japanese.  Martha said that, earlier in the evening, when she and the other two women from Threshold Choir were singing, going from room to room at Coming Home Hospice, they came to two rooms where the patients had visitors.  The visitors asked them to go ahead and sing, and some of the visitors joined in so that they became seven singers.  
That's about 10 precent of what happened, but I don't feel free to speak about other people present without their permission -- and, of course, the focus here was on wonderful Maxine Hong Kingston.  Ms. Kingston knows that reality, dream, and fiction are the same thing, with many mysterious lacunae in the mix.  It's like the quotation from Marcel Proust at the beginning of the Alchemist's Pillow blog:  "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time."

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Blood Poem Number Two

....Blood Poem Number One having been destroyed by the person who received it....


Tuesday, March 22, 2011

CYRUS CASSELLS, POET AND TRANSLATOR

Cyrus Cassells read today, 22 March 2011, at the luncheon gathering of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco.  He spoke about and read his translations from the Catalan language of poet Franscec Parcerisas, and from his own poetry.  I do not like much contemporary poetry, but at first glance knew that I was going to love his poetry.

Cyrus read most of the Parcerisas verses in Catalan after reading his English translations.

With a wealth of experience around the globe, Cassells is also currently working on a book with various Europeans about youths in World War II.  Then, as now, some of the young can be touched by idealism and incredible courage.  The book will be called THE CROSSED-OUT SWASTIKA, in honor of Hans Scholl who went about in World War II, crossing out any swastikas he saw posted on public walls.  You may know that Hans and his sister Sophie, and others involved in non-violent action against the Nazis, at the University of Munich were part of a group called The White Rose.  Eventually all were executed by the Nazis.  At least one film has been made about them, which is probably accessible for viewing on the Internet, SOPHIE SCHOLL:  THE FINAL DAYS.

In a very circular fashion, The Center for the Art of Translation has directed people to this entry on my blog, and I, in turn, now provide you a link where you may hear Mr. Cassells' presentation at CAT -- low volume for those introducing him, but you can hear Mr. Cassells speak of and recite his translations and some of his own poetry:  http://www.catranslation.org/blogpost/cyrus-cassells-on-francesc-parcerisas


Sunday, March 20, 2011

Finding an Old Valentine


I came across this.  A long while ago a local San Francisco station ran a contest in which 4 or 6 people might win a competition for writing about their valentines.  Each of the winners would have a segment on their station, with video of the writer and his or her valentine, as the writer read the text that had won.  I was chosen as one among the six, and I had to prepare for a camera to intrude on a certain still shy person -- In my place I created Tiger Face which I posted on my wall to safeguard me and my valentine.  


My Valentine

"Our love story began fourteen years ago when she left the person she was living with and came to my house.  We were both very strungout – not a good place to begin to learn how to love, but we taught each other; it would require a very long book to describe the ups and downs by which we have come to the place we are now; it’s much less dramatic, but this is where the greater love story begins.

"You would hardly think it romantic that she is dying of leukemia.  Dying heroines excite love in movies and operas, but in our everyday lives we don’t think of sickness and dying as attractive.

"Yet it has been affection that has grown, not any feeling of dread or disgust.  Draped in my arms, her body growing lighter and lighter, it’s as if she were not dying but turning into a silk scarf.  This is the end that should be terrible, but it’s like a long last act of La Traviata with brave Violetta singing her last song over and over,
but never really letting go.  I will go on being suspended in her song even when she is gone.

"A greyness and a whiteness is being cast over her color as if she will disappear under snow.  But the love she has given me will remain, better than words, a big red rose like a cardinal jumping down a snowbank.  You wouldn’t think this was romantic either, but I know I will always smile, after I cry, when I remember the brush of her whiskers against the corner of my mouth.  She does that when she’s hungry for petting, affection, or food.  Love is love, you know, no matter who teaches you, even someone like my dear cat Cirrus."

I suppose you found "the hook" in this piece, that probably assured its acceptance, by the second paragraph, if not right away.  It was a sweet video, I think, but the video played on what I had counted would also cause it to win:  the image of the pathetic old gay guy, lonely, with no friend but his "great love," his cat.  Well, it was not all cunning and ego, and I DID learn to love from my cat, as all cat lovers know.


Thursday, March 03, 2011

A Verse by Victor Gonzalez Perez (AKA Victor Gonzalez)


Victor Gonzalez Perez was born in Aibonito, Puerto Rico.  His parents immigrated to San Francisco, California when he was a child.  His family later moved to Brooklyn, New York. From New York they moved back to Puerto Rico, and then back to San Francisco, California where he spent the major part of his life. He is now retired and resides permanently in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. He wrote this verse in San Francisco in 1971.
Right Now Boxed Into Walls
      by Victor Gonzalez Perez

                 A thin veil bars
                 -- mine and theirs -- 
                 And yet miniscule glimpses
                 -- eyes blinking
                 Gasping for an answer beyond now.

                 Recuerdos (memories)

                 Upon the tiny plaza where
                 sleep the dead heroes
                 the fountain stands
                 eternal vigil.

                 Fire tree leaves
                 -- el flamboyan --
                carpet the promenade
                a lovers' nest.

                Recuerdos (memories)

red faced roofs and balconies like embroidered
mouths where grandma sat on her sugarcane
throne counting the seasons
her eyes of spanish tiles watching green mountains
dangling from the clouds
while the tiny insect troubadors lulled the night
to sleep in its satin hammock

                Ahora (& now)

                The day swallows
                the rainbow garden's
                frail butterfly

                The arch of thorns
                crumbles on its halo
                -- and you and i struggle on
                perched on the brink
                of yesterdays.

                               [November 1971]